At Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Strategies keynote speech he lamented that the industry is so fragmented.
The industry is divided into multiple camps; white hats vs. black hats and SEO vs. PPC, as the two main opposing camps. The major point Danny made was that this doesn’t serve the industry overall and that we have more in common then not.
This fragmentation seems to affect people’s judgment in a number of ways but what has really struck me is how it keeps blinders on people. These opposing camps use different tools and don’t seem to talk to one another. The article will give a short description of a new PPC/AdWords feature that can be used as a SEO tool. As a matter of fact, no one at the Chicago Search Engines Strategies session on SEO tools mentioned this, pretty much reinforcing Danny’s point.
This tool is Googles latest Keyword Suggestion tool. For a long time Google’s Keyword suggestion tool has been playing second fiddle to Yahoo/Overture’s and the serious heavyweight WordTracker. But Mountain View’s latest pass does a good job of catching up. My point here isn’t to review Google’s KST from a PPC perspective, that’s the point of another article. This article purpose it to describe it as an SEO tool.
Now it’s not that easy to use it this way but it’s worth the time and money. The investment is $5.00, the amount it takes to setup a Google AdWords account and at least one campaign. Remember the minute you setup a campaign you can turn it off so you don’t actually have to run the ad that you create. I am assuming that you’ve got your AdWords account and have created that first ad group, now the fun begins.
OK, you’ve got your login and password, get into your account. Second access any campaign and then drill down into any ad group. Next click through to the “Keyword Tool” link on the ad group page. You are going to see two tabs in the middle of the page; “Keyword Variations” and “Site-Related Keywords”. The “Keyword Variations” tab will take you to the standard type of keyword selection tool you’ve come to expect. Feed the tool a core term and it will come back with other related terms. It is quite good and even categorizes words into related groups.
The really interesting tool, from an SEO perspective, is the “Site-Related Keywords”, which is the second tab. When you use this feature you input a URL. It can be any specific web page. When you give it the URL and press the “get keywords” button the results come back with a list of search terms that the Google algorithm believes that page’s content is related to; the list is even sorted by relevance! To quote the Google help page “Sorting keywords by relevance within the tool helps ensure that you see the keywords most likely to be successful for your Ad Group first.”
This means you can use this feature to make iterative modification to the page to make sure you are matching the AdWords relevancy ranking system. What makes this pretty amazing is the fact that recently Google announced “Quality Score”. The Google Quality score is not only rating the content of the AdWords ad you place but the landing page that your ad is pointing to. Again to quote the Google AdWords help pages, “This is the basis for measuring the quality of your keyword and determining your minimum bid. Quality Score is determined by your keywords clickthrough rate (CTR), relevance of your ad text, historical keyword performance, the quality of your ads landing page, and other relevancy factors.” Well guess what, if you start to compare pages that do well organically to the “Site Related Keywords” results you can see that Google is giving you free SEO advice. Of course other factors like Page Rank, Google’s famous and critical off-page factor, isn’t part of this evaluation. But as an “on page” evaluation methodology you’re getting the master’s advice.
Jordan Glogau has been involved with marketing and sales on the Internet since 1995. Jordan is presently doing Search Engine and Internet Marketing and can be contacted at jglogau@phr400.com or 845-426-6864.
